You want to grow your MSP, and you have probably realized that word-of-mouth and referrals can only get you so far. You know you have to do marketing to attract prospects and close more sales, but if you start driving people to your website from marketing initiatives, are you confident that your website will do the job of capturing the leads?

Having a great website is, without a doubt, the most important piece of the marketing and sales puzzle. It’s where your ads, posts, and emails point to. It’s the first thing a prospect would check before giving you a chance. That’s a lot of pressure. Is your website in its best shape?

Let’s take a look!

Analyze your Current Situation

This is a list of several sites that would help you analyze the current status of your website:

1. Google Analytics: With this tool you can see how many people visit your website over any period of time and how long they stay on your site. You can see if they leave immediately after arriving and how many pages they visit if they stay. You can also see how fast your pages are loading, what channels are driving the most traffic, what devices and browsers your visitors use, etc.
2. Website Grader: This website will let you know if your site is fast enough, mobile responsive and optimized for search (and give you a score). It is fun to make little updates to your site and see the score go up.
3. Hotjar: This tool allows you to see how far down people scroll on your site and what links are getting the most clicks.
4. Google Webmaster Tools: This is another tool made by Google in which you can see if you have any error pages (presenting 404 or 500 error codes), the websites linking to your site, and the keywords people typed to find your website.
5. Agency Analytics: This website will let you check your rankings for the keywords that are most important to your business on search engine results pages. You can also compare your rankings to those of your competitors, see your inbound links, and more.

If these tools indicate your website is not performing to your advantage, don’t despair. Taking steps to correct it now will put you ahead of the competition.

Use the Latest Web Design Trends

The tools above tell you how your site is working, but the look of your website has a lot to do with its performance.

1. Storytelling: Each page should flow like a conversation does. The design helps the copy tell the story of why your MSP is the solution to your prospects or clients’ technology issues. Something that we see more often now is that each page on your website tells a story, not just the homepage. People, now more than ever, access your website from many pages, especially if you have a blog.
2. Vibrant color schemes and gradients: Use color to help tell your story. Use it to captivate the attention of your web visitors. Use gradients to smooth the vibrant colors and smooth transitions between sections on a page.
3. Video: More and more people seek to digest content visually. Use video to tell your story and keep prospects on your website longer. Try to give them all the info they need before they leave your website.
4. Custom Illustrations: Illustrations have been used for many years now, but if you really want your website and brand to stand out, use custom-made illustrations.
5. Interactions and Animations: Use interactions and subtle animations to keep web visitors engaged on the page as they scroll down and to drive them to the call-to-actions you want them to click on.
6. Great mobile versions: Your website has to be mobile responsive, yes, but now more than ever, the mobile version of your website and its user experience has to be even greater than the desktop version. It can no longer be a second thought.

Build a Better Website

Use the information you have gathered and the new design trends you learned about to create an amazing website that will serve as your online business card. But, don’t overthink it.

Start with a website that has no more than 5 pages. These pages are usually: Home page, About, Services, Clients/Testimonials, Contact Us. Make these pages great! Take the time to write the copy and think about how each page should flow to tell its story and drive people to contact you, but make sure it gets done within a month, again, don’t overthink it.

Obviously, a web design or marketing agency would build your website--but if hiring outside resources is not in your budget, use affordable and simple services like SquareSpace or WordPress.org. Just take your time to make those initial 5 pages amazing.

After the initial re-launch of your website, add a new page every month. Give each service or solution provided by your MSP its own page, create a page for each partnership, etc. Adding one page per month will allow you to create great content that users will enjoy, and search engines will pick it up. It will also make your website project more affordable and less overwhelming. After a few months you will have a very complete and robust website.

Continuously Optimize your Website

This article has highlighted the importance of a well performing, nice looking website to represent your company online, but that is just the beginning.

Gone are the days of launching a website and leaving it as is for over two years. To stay ahead of the game, you must continue to oil the machine, striving for greater performance. That’s why it is very important for MSPs to keep using the tools we spoke about at the beginning of this article, to keep an eye on the performance of your website and to find areas of improvement.

Maybe you find out that visitors are leaving your website after a very short period of time and decide to add a video to keep them engaged for longer.

Maybe you find out that visitors are not scrolling down the pages and decide to add animations and visual aids to let people know that there is more information below.

Maybe you find out one call-to-action is getting more clicks than another and decide to use the stronger CTA in more places around the website.

These are just examples of the types of optimizations you could do to your website on an ongoing basis to make it a better lead generation machine.

Remember, disregarding of the current state of your website, launching a new website doesn’t have to be a huge, 6-month project. Start small, add to it as you go, and optimize it to make it your best sales and marketing tool.